'There is a new type of politics that is undermining the credibility of official statistics,' says Joao Pedro Azevedo, chief statistician for the United Nations children's agency UNICEF in New York City. Official statistics are data collected and validated by both national statistical agencies and international organizations. Nearly every country has an agency for official statistics. They collect information and organize it into statistics about myriad aspects of life, including what people earn, how many individuals are employed, how well children perform in school, the quality of nutrition, how long patients have to wait for an operation, levels of air pollution and increases to average temperatures. National agencies collect data through surveys and from secondary sources. These data sets are used by governments to inform policy, by businesses to plan for the future, and by researchers and advocacy organizations. Official statistics, such as those measuring nations' gross domestic product (GDP), are also the foundation for monitoring progress towards the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, the world's plan to end poverty and achieve environmental sustainability....
Most corporate circular economy strategies focus on incremental improvements in products and operations, overlooking transformative innovations emerging from grassroots communities. These local initiatives'driven by necessity and resource constraints'offer scalable solutions for waste reduction, supply chain resilience, and environmental and social leadership. To unlock shared value and future-proof business, leaders should broaden their innovation funnel, map waste streams, invest in community partnerships, and update metrics to reflect both different types of return on investment....
Scientists have produced the most detailed 3D map of almost all buildings in the world. The map, called GlobalBuildingAtlas, combines satellite imagery and machine learning to generate 3D models for 97% of buildings on Earth. The data set, published in the open-access journal Earth System Science Data on 1 December1, covers 2.75 billion buildings, each mapped with footprints and heights at a spatial resolution of 3 metres by 3 metres. The 3D map opens new possibilities for disaster risk assessment, climate modelling and urban planning, according to study co-author Xiaoxiang Zhu, an Earth observation data scientist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. It could also help to improve how researchers monitor United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals for cities and communities, Zhu adds. Conventionally, creating detailed 3D maps at a global scale has been difficult, say Zhu, because it usually requires either laser scanning or high'resolution stereo imagery. The team's solution was to combine deep learning with laser-scanning techniques to predict building heights. The tool was trained on reference data obtained using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) from 168 cities, mostly in Europe, North America and Oceania....
During the five years I worked as an environmental-studies professor at a progressive private college, I undertook a small, semesterly rebellion: I had students read 'Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,' a 2011 essay by the British writer and former green radical Paul Kingsnorth. In it, Kingsnorth chronicles his disenchantment with the activism that had once been his life's work'the very kind of advocacy that had driven many of my students, that had driven me, into that classroom in the first place. The essay makes the case that mainstream environmentalism has abandoned the commitments and ideas that originally defined it. Classic texts of the 1960s and '70s, including Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful, took a sort of ascetic posture as they warned about the ecological risks posed by technology, industry, and development. They asked societies and individuals to live more simply, consume less, and go'grow'more slowly. As Kingsnorth sees it, the ideological landscape began to change in the '80s and '90s, when ecologically minded people embraced the idea that global industrialization could continue at its breakneck pace and simply be made 'green' through 'sustainable development.' To Kingsnorth, 'sustainability' is not a laudable goal to strive for but rather the emergent rot in the green apple....
